RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Building Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) APIs

We briefly covered this topic in Chapter 1, Introducing the REST Architectural Style, under the Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) section. 

Before we get into the details of the JAX-RS and Jersey offerings, let's take a step back to understand the need for HATEOAS APIs. When exposing operations to be performed on an entity via RESTful services, one of the key things that gets undermined is exposing the entity relationships to the consumer of the service. The flow on impact is that the consumer ends up hardcoding the logic in the client application.

Let's take the case of an online shopping cart application. Is it wise to allow the creation of an order ...